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Curtain

Berlin, 1858. The popular satirist David Kalisch starts a parody of Wagner’s Tannhäuser: “The curtain rises slowly.”¹ His mention of an opening curtain would seem unremarkable were it not that it occurs not in the stage directions but in the rhymed verses proper, where the narrating singer describes the curtain’s motion before evoking Venus “sprawled out on roses.” As chapter 1 has shown, Tannhäuser’s first scene might well have incited scorn among contemporaries, given its long initial vocal silence—something perhaps alluded to by the slowness of Kalisch’s curtain. But the curtain’s opening was, one should think, standard theatrical fare. And yet, other Wagner skits similarly spoofed the curtain. In 1890, a much- performed sendup of Der Ring des Nibelungen by Martin Böhm (another successful author of Berlin farces) listed as central dramatic components “completely new decorations, machines, and bright lights, as well as a curtain made of Filet [finely laced cloth] that neatly separates the four days’ works.” The stage directions later explain that this Filet-Vorhang falls “quasi as a drop scene; thus, while the backstage is being changed, one can see everything through it.”² In other words, the specially announced Filet curtain is revealed as a red herring and, hence, ridiculous. In the 1878 satire Der Ring, der nie gelungen by Berlin-based journalist Paul Gisbert, the curtain does fall properly. But it does so with a vengeance. At the end of the Rheingold skit, it comes down “with horror, dumbfounded” at Fasolt’s death. After Die Walküre, it falls “with dignity and decency” on the (apparently uncomfortable) sight of a sleeping woman. In Siegfried, the title hero knowingly provokes an indignant curtain when calling for love out of wedlock; as a “precaution,” the curtain “indeed comes down little by little” lest the illicit couple exhibit their love publicly. And at the end of Götterdämmerung, nothing is left for the curtain but “to fall, thoroughly speechlessly.”³ Gisbert’s satire turns the curtain into a mute character whose movements pronounce emotional reactions and ethical judgments: in the manner of a commentator or chorus, the curtain proclaims the moral, protecting, bonding with, and gesturing toward the spectators. Beyond just participating in the farce, this curtain becomes its master. Mediating between audience and author, it has the final (scoffing) word.

All three parodies highlight Wagner’s curtains as unusual, whether by means of their speed, their ineffectual fabric and virtual absence, or (on the contrary) their explicit intervention in the drama. Indeed, Wagner is the only composer—and, along with Brecht, the only dramatist tout court—to have a particular type of curtain named after him, a circumstance that seems to confirm his extraordinary attention to curtain practices. Aside from satirists, though, nineteenth-century critics rarely mentioned the workings and effects of the curtain in ordinary Wagner productions, save some observations on the innovative curtain technology of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The composer himself, otherwise so verbal about every artistic aspect of his creations, likewise remained curiously shy about the subject, thereby suggesting its association with “mere” technology (as discussed in the introduction). And most composers and opera scholars have shared in this silence. An integral part of theatrical architecture from the time of opera’s beginnings, the curtain has mostly been taken for granted. As a character in Jane Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park laconically declared, “there is very little sense in a play without a curtain.”⁴ In other words, the curtain appears fundamental for establishing a performative situation, which it achieves by separating the latter from everyday actions. Even outside the theater, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, a curtain alone can manifest that fundamental “line . . . between a staging area where the performance proper occurs and an audience region,” thereby signaling both the transformation of actors into characters and the onset of make-belief that together establish what he dubs the “theatrical frame.”⁵ It is thus unsurprising that the red velvet curtain so beloved of theaters since the nineteenth century has turned into an icon of theatrical performance per se.⁶

Precisely because of its ubiquity, however, the curtain has received much less critical attention than have other, more novel aspects of nineteenth-century stage technology, such as electric light effects or contraptions rendering complex scenic fantasies ever more realistic. Despite its blatant visibility, the curtain has—ironically—tended to remain conceptually invisible: its practical, artistic, and hermeneutic contributions to staged opera have often lingered in obscurity. This is the case even where, since the late eighteenth century, composers increasingly employed the curtain as an individual, expressive ingredient. To be sure, as I will show, this perceptual “disappearance” was part and parcel of the immersive illusionist aesthetic that drove the customization of curtain uses in the first place. (In this regard, our satirists’ very noticing of the curtain points to a failure of Wagner’s endeavor to conceal his technologies.) But only recently have scholars begun to theorize the aesthetic import of curtains since the establishment of the Baroque stage—that is, after curtain technology had ceased to be a novelty. And they have tended to do so either from a dramaturgical angle and often concerning contemporary theater,⁷ or with regard to select composers who paid special attention to curtains. Foundational studies of the latter kind are Patrick Taïeb’s examination of how French composers began to connect overtures to the ensuing opera during the half century around 1800, and Helen Greenwald’s insightful discussion of Puccini’s carefully crafted opening curtains a century later: both analyze the multifaceted potential of relating sound and sight at an opera’s beginning by means of deliberately placed curtains. Michael Anders has expanded this discussion to address Puccini’s closing curtains, while Johanna Dombois’s recent metaphorical exploration of the Wagner curtain’s signification pioneers an anatomic approach to curtain technology.⁸ Building on all this work, this chapter pursues a longer, transnational perspective on nineteenth-century opera’s growing use of the curtain as creative artistic medium. By tracing its gradual rise as what I have called a Wagnerian technology, I show how composers progressively scripted the curtain to precisely entwine opera’s visual and aural domains. The curtain not only furthered multimedia smoothness, but also opened new spaces, literally, for creative—and increasingly subtle—mediations between opera’s various media.

Historically, the curtain does emerge as time-honored theatrical equipment that has undergone relatively few changes over the past four centuries. After its early uses in classical Roman theater as well as medieval mystery plays (among other ritual performances), the curtain had intermittently appeared only as part of stage sets, to close off particular onstage areas.⁹ In Shakespeare’s theater-in-the-round, for instance, small curtains occasionally covered doors, alcoves, or other “diegetic” spaces within the set to obscure the entrances or exits of characters.¹⁰ The proscenium curtain proper was reintroduced in sixteenth-century Italy with the emergence of the enclosed box-theater and its picture-frame stage: for the Baroque theater (as this illusionist, perspective stage is often summarily called) a large front curtain became quasi-constitutive for hiding the stage setup and its ornate decorations until the beginning of a performance. This function was particularly important for the new genre of opera, with its unprecedented media complexity and scenic pomp. Indeed, the stage curtain was popularized across Europe above all by Italian opera.¹¹ As one of the earliest commentators on stage technology, the Italian-trained German architect Joseph Furttenbach the Elder, explained in 1640, “Since the spectators, on entering the theater, should not be able to see the complete scene of the stage, a curtain appropriate to the following action is hung in front of the scene. . . . When the spectator takes his seat he must be content for a short time with anticipation, which will only whet his appetite.”¹² By veiling the scene, the front curtain marked both the stage space and the impending performance upon it as extraordinary—so exceptional as to be revealed only temporarily and at particular, predetermined times. Thus it also increased expectations for this special event.

In creating anticipation, however, the curtain reinforced its own subsidiary essence. After all, it was a placeholder or blank space, a promise of something yet to come, and its chief purpose was to be eventually—and inevitably—removed to disclose the “real” show behind it. This indexical function of curtains was pinpointed as early as the first century AD by Pliny the Elder in his famous account of the legendary artistic competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius. After the former painted grapes so realistically that birds came to feed on them, the latter produced a picture veiled by a curtain that Zeuxis instinctively went to draw to see the alleged painting—only to realize that the curtain itself was painted.¹³ Casting the curtain as mechanism to protect an artwork, Pliny at the same time stresses the anticipated effect of its removal precisely by denying it—by having Parrhasius’s touch transform the (painted) curtain into the artwork itself. Conversely, Baroque proscenium curtains in particular were often richly decorated or painted with landscapes or mythological scenes.¹⁴ This appearance was intended not only to elevate the theater’s splendor, but also to channel the spectators’ gaze toward the stage before a show and, thereby, amplify the impression of both perspectival depth and realism once the static, flat canvas gave way to animated stage action. Curtain and picture merged to elevate claims to artistry—of Parrhasius’s painterly skills or of theatrical performance in general.

In order to intensify the anticipation incited by the theatrical curtain, Furttenbach and other early seventeenth-century authors recommended that it be removed as quickly as possible, making audiences suddenly feel transported into the stage action.¹⁵ To this end, around 1600 some Italian stages imitated classical models by having the curtain drop into a groove at stage front.¹⁶ Alternatively, curtains were pulled up, rolled up, or parted in the middle and drawn aside. Either way, they moved primarily at the commencements of performances. Only gradually did it become customary to veil the stage again at the ends of shows or (even later) of individual acts; as we shall see, this development was related to a growing emphasis on uninterrupted illusion and the concomitant ambivalence about the visibility of machines.¹⁷ Against this brief historical snapshot, it is small wonder that the curtain could easily be understood to operate merely outside and independently of individual theatrical performances.

And yet, this chapter shows that in opera the use of the curtain became more frequent and more nuanced from the late eighteenth century on, as composers gradually took cognizance of it: they drew the curtain into their operatic visions by coordinating its movements ever more purposefully with the drama, envisioned stage imagery, and music. The old technology of the curtain thus no longer just enhanced audience enchantment, demarcated performances as out-of-the-ordinary, and signaled their beginnings and endings. Instead, I suggest, it became an operatic medium in its own right. As such, the curtain operated across multiple spatial, temporal, medial, and conceptual borders. This left it moving between total visibility and (almost) complete concealment, static architecture and dynamic performance, permanent machinery and ephemeral effect, stage and auditorium, actors and spectators, dramatic time and real time, fictional world and reality, musical evocation and visual presentation. Wagner’s idiosyncratic curtain dramaturgy to which the parodies alluded was thus but part of a longer-term development, one that partook of the budding concern among composers with key aspects of staging.

In order to assess this larger history, the first sections of this chapter survey operatic curtain practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, moving from opening curtains via intermediary drops to closing curtains, and from standard procedures to composers’ specification of curtains to align sound and vision in dramatically resonant ways. Having disclosed how these conventions developed before Wagner began his career, I will then zoom in on both his works and the actual curtain he used in Bayreuth to examine the sites where his zeal to conceal everything technological manifested most literally, and to understand why our satirists would alight on his curtains as unusual. A concluding peek into the twentieth century confirms Wagner’s influence on the continuing exploration of the curtain’s expressive potential as well as the eventual rejection of that potential in light of an anti-illusionist (and anti-Wagnerian) reemphasis on the technological conditioning of all theater. Lifting the operatic curtain on itself, as it were, this chapter thus expands our awareness of a facet of opera’s material complexity in performance that brings new insights into opera’s characteristic interplay of acoustic and optical media. In the end, the curtain might epitomize not just theatrical performance but also the smooth multimedia surface commonly aspired to by operatic composers and producers of the long nineteenth century and beyond.

FRAMING A SHOW

Until well into the nineteenth century, operating the theatrical curtain seems to have remained mostly a mechanical concern. As the voluminous Allgemeines Theater-Lexikon explained in 1839 for both opera and spoken drama, “The opening of the curtain should, as an absolute rule, occur immediately after the completion of the overture or interlude. Every pause has a disruptive effect.”¹⁸ An Italian stage directors’ manual of 1825 additionally warned not to interrupt the overture “with the inopportune raising of the curtain.”¹⁹ The latter was, then, to be aligned exactly with the end of the musical introduction and the beginning of the show proper. By the same token, it would close with the end of the stage performance. More of a novelty was the practice of lowering the curtain at the close of each act—pioneered, it seems, in Germanic theaters. German plays, in fact, habitually mention the curtain simply to indicate the beginnings and endings of acts. Hence the traditional German term for “act,” Aufzug (literally, the pulling open or drawing up), a term to which Wagner reverted beginning with Der fliegende Holländer (Dresden, 1843) in his quest to create a distinctly German national opera.²⁰

At the Paris Opéra, by contrast, open transformations had traditionally taken pride of place. But the Staging Committee, established in 1827, appears to have instituted the closing of curtains not just before intermissions but also at the ends of intermediary acts—a practice otherwise known in France from less well-equipped stages in the provinces as well as from spoken theater and comic opera. The first such curtains may have appeared in Auber’s La muette de Portici (1828) and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829).²¹ That they were adopted at the Opéra partly for practical reasons can be inferred from the fact that Meyerbeer, who had envisioned an open transformation after the first act of Le prophète (1849), suggested, in rehearsal, that the curtain be lowered after all.²² And such “act curtains” quickly became the norm. By 1860, a comparative manual for German, French, and English stages stated plainly that the curtain “closes the opening [of the stage] during the entr’actes.” Similarly, in 1885 French music writer Arthur Pougin defined the main or proscenium curtain (rideau d’avant-scène) as that “which closes the scene from the eyes of the spectators, [and] which one lifts and lowers at the beginning and end of each act”:²³ the curtain provided an on/off switch for the audiovisual drama.

Across European opera houses, in other words, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the curtain established as a default frame for each act. While the proscenium itself optically resembled the static, material frame around a painting, the curtain provided a dynamic, temporal equivalent for the time-bound art of stage performance. Much like the traditional gilded picture frame, it functioned primarily to delimit and present, in the words of a late eighteenth-century aesthetician, “that which is already complete”:²⁴ it marked the end of everyday reality and the onset of the represented world that would transport the spectator into a different spatiotemporal as well as narrative universe.²⁵ This boundary was regularly permeable only to “mere” instrumental music before or between acts. In spoken theater, in fact, at least until the 1850s musical entr’actes normally reinforced the curtain’s frame; they were to start “right after the curtain has fallen and cease not until it rises again.”²⁶ Curtain and musical interludes thus joined forces to mark the “edges” of individual acts and bridge the time between them both visually and sonically. And since audiences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rarely left the auditorium (foyers were not yet common), entr’actes also helped sustain the emotional “space” of the drama or afforded relaxation, their length regularly exceeding the time required to change the stage sets.²⁷

By comparison, the operatic curtain carried more bordering weight on its own. After all, music marked the stage performance proper without necessarily being suspended between acts, while silence (conversely) did not always immediately signify the end of an act. An 1841 Theater-Lexikon therefore recommended that in opera the sign for maneuvering the curtain (usually a bell—hence the saying “to ring down the curtain”) should be given to the stagehands not by the stage manager, as in spoken drama, but by the prompter, by means of a wire connected to a backstage bell. The prompter would have received the signal—via a noiseless wire pull attached to moveable sticks—from the conductor:²⁸ obviously, the latter knew the musical structure best. In addition to the preelectric transmission technologies involved in perfecting the curtain’s timing (effected by telegraph later in the century), this arrangement reveals an inverted hierarchy of music and stage technologies when compared to spoken theater. For opera, the machinists ideally accorded with musical timings rather than themselves determining the length of entr’actes.

In practice, though, directing curtains remained a collaboration between stage manager and conductor, to be worked out for each piece. When intermediary acts were preceded not by an intermission but by an entr’acte, for example, the conductor needed to be notified at the appropriate time that the stage was ready.²⁹ Furthermore, the stage manager oversaw the riggers who in most nineteenth-century theaters manually operated the curtain by pulling its counterweighted rope. In Paris, the curtain therefore remained part of the stage manager’s purview until 1875, when Charles Garnier’s new opera house pioneered an electric curtain mechanism that conductors themselves could activate (or play like an instrument) via a simple button.³⁰ This electrification neatly symbolizes composers’ increasing control of the curtain that this chapter will trace, while highlighting the curtain’s continuing practical dependence on (and essence as) technology. Nonetheless, the artistic decision as to when the proscenium curtain should reveal or conceal the stage was mostly a done deal in early nineteenth-century theaters.

The existence of such standard practices may make one suspect that opera composers did not need to indicate curtains, at least not for works that followed musical conventions; and this assumption seems to be borne out by contemporary scores. Admittedly, some caution is in order when conjecturing about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century curtain routines on the basis of scores. A look at the recent critical editions of Meyerbeer’s trend-setting grands opéras underlines the liberty with which curtain cues were omitted, adjusted, or added in the often abridged published scores of the era (whether orchestral or vocal), and even more extensively in later editions. Moreover, original performance materials, where extant, reveal further discrepancies between written instructions and actual procedures. This situation thwarts any conclusive findings on when, why, and by whom curtains were first prescribed, what or who might have motivated this development, and how exactly the practices of various countries, theaters, and composers influenced each other. What is more, changes in the placement of curtains between houses or over time (as evinced in many performance scores) were related not only to artistic considerations but also to the variable speed of curtains, a product of their weight, cloth, and mechanisms. Alas, hardly any documentation survives for this material aspect or for the precise tasks and physical labor performed by the stagehands operating the curtains.³¹ But a sampling of available critical editions, facsimile autographs, nineteenth-century scores, production books, and occasional performance materials does reveal general trends among the core French, Italian, and Austro-German repertories—tendencies that increasingly individualize the generic framing described above.

PRECOCIOUS OPENINGS

Before approximately the 1820s, curtains at the beginnings of operas tended to be notated in the score only where the onset of the first scene was musically ambiguous or—relatedly—where a composer sought to achieve a special effect. Both situations occurred particularly in operas that blended the overture seamlessly into the music of the first act proper, often by eschewing musical closure. As Patrick Taïeb has shown in his extensive study of French opera overtures between 1770 and 1820, their integration with the main drama was a chief objective of French composers who, in the wake of Gluck’s reforms, wanted to make all music dramatically relevant. In Taïeb’s analysis, beyond acoustically heralding a performance and thereby hushing the audience, overtures were now often tailored to serve either or both of two main functions: to set the general atmosphere of the opera (or its key moments) and/or to prepare for the first scene.³² Particularly in the latter case, it was expedient for overtures to link directly into the first act, so as not to interrupt the established sonic ambience with a pause and applause. This intended continuity encouraged closer interaction of music and curtain, which in turn required the curtain’s opening to be specified.

The oeuvre of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, who was known for—among other innovations—experimental treatments of overtures and entr’actes, offers a helpful platform for gauging how the curtain consequently became more relevant in specific musical and dramatic situations. What emerges from this exploration is that the joining of overture and first act frequently precipitated what we might call a “precocious” curtain relative to the onset of the first scene. In his comedy Le magnifique (Paris, Comédie-Italien, 1773), for instance, Grétry asked for the curtain to be raised seventeen measures before the triumphant end of his substantial overture, during the forte repeat—turned from minor to major—of a four-measure closing motif that leads into two cycles of emphatic I–IV–V–I cadences and five loud tonic chords before a half-measure rest. With a two-measure general pause following, this caesura would have been the traditional—and natural—place for the curtain. But Grétry requested that the first scene be “linked” with the overture. And since act 1 starts with a sole drum tattoo sounding “in the distance,” it was necessary to raise the curtain earlier, for only thus could the silence initiating act 1 become dramatically meaningful (rather than occasioning applause for the emerging scene) and the tattoo audible.³³ Its audibility is all the more important as the tattoo frames the overture itself: it recalls the drumbeats that had sounded in the wings behind the closed curtain at its beginning and that continue to punctuate the first scene’s military marches. The launch of act 1, then, retrospectively reveals the overture to have been partly diegetic music (including its sometimes polyphonic texture and the inclusion of a popular song). This unusual format was inspired by Michel-Jean Sedaine’s libretto, according to which during the overture “a file of prisoners will be seen passing behind the scene; the chanting of priests will be heard”: Grétry designed his overture as an imaginary, musically stylized “representation” of this pantomime. And its effect depended on the curtain first denying and then prematurely granting vision.³⁴

Grétry’s operas Amphitryon (Versailles, 1786) and Anacréon chez Polycrate (Paris, Opéra, 1797) merged their overtures with the subdued first scenes not merely via an early curtain but also through an explicit musical transition that impeded a break. As Taïeb has argued, such sonic links were generally favored for nocturnal scenes (as in Amphitryon) or the sunrises recurrently launching French operas (as in Anacréon)³⁵—dusky settings that did not lend themselves to sudden exposure and applause. Accordingly, Grétry did not close the overtures harmonically but specified the curtain opening at caesuras fifteen and eight measures before their ends, respectively. In Amphitryon, the curtain coincides with a sudden rallentando and a thinning of texture and dynamics for a temporarily static sound field on the dominant that seamlessly morphs into the subtle sunrise evocation of act 1 (example 2.1); in Anacréon, the curtain opens, conversely, with the triumphant return of the full orchestra on the tonic leading to a drawn-out modulation—a passage that sonically prepares a space for the shimmering pianissimo figurations of scene 1 that paint the dawn proper. Interpolated curtain-raising passages thus provided time for the curtain to open as part of the show,³⁶ while the curtain only began a process of making-visible that continued with the slowly increasing light onstage. Overture and first scene were welded together both aurally and through a continuing process of optical revelation initiated by the premature curtain.

EXAMPLE 2.1. André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Amphitryon: after the return of the overture’s opening material in m. 102, a subtle curtain-raising passage leads smoothly into the nocturnal act 1.

Grétry was not the only composer exploring early curtains as a means of interlocking overtures and first scenes. Gluck, for one, employed the device to enhance a not subtle but instead unusually forceful opening. In his widely influential Paris Alceste of 1776, he indicated “lever la toile” eight measures before the overture’s close, during a passage that repeats an otherwise unassuming motif from four measures earlier with an increasingly wider harmonic and dynamic range leading—again—to the dominant. The instruction was likely added because the first act starts immediately with the full chorus rather than an instrumental introduction and recitative, as had been the case in the 1767 Vienna version. Thus, the steady buildup in dynamics and texture over a pulsating dominant pedal during the overture’s last six measures leads breathlessly to the ensuing choral outcry on a diminished chord. By asking for the curtain to (begin to) raise about fifteen seconds before that chorus, Gluck achieved a continual accumulation of audiovisual tension while ensuring that the audience could marvel at the stage sets before focusing on the action and singing proper. As Taïeb has argued, the choral anguish, in turn, explained the overture’s unusually dramatic transition. The early curtain thus drives home the urgency at the onset of the opera—the exceptional circumstance that it begins, rather than ends, with the impending death of a king.³⁷

This is not to say that every idiosyncratic beginning required the written placement of a curtain. In his 1784 opéra-comique Richard Cœur-de-lion, Grétry fully integrated a condensed overture into the first number, which—following Italianate models—was a choral introduction. Here, the music itself suggests the timing of the opening curtain at the end of the short initial Allegretto, after an emphatic turn to the dominant (complete with a long-held chord whose pragmatic utility is obvious) and right before a 6/8 Larghetto whose lilting rhythm both alludes to the first scene’s rustic setting and leads into the introductory chorus.³⁸ Conversely, curtain instructions might occasionally appear without obvious dramatic motivation or despite musical closure of the overture.³⁹ But in general, it was overtures leading directly into act 1 that tended to align their precocious curtain with suitable musical material: the curtain might open during a caesura or fermata; before a shift of key, dynamics, or texture; or to final cadential chords. And the fact that these curtain-raising moments often commenced an even number of measures before the first scene suggests that they were a function of the music more than of the emerging visual setting.

Given this evident desire to tie some overtures into the action by repurposing their endings, it is unsurprising that some composers experimented with raising the curtain even earlier, so as to utilize more (or all) of the overture for nonvocal stage setting. An obvious way to do so was with mimed action during the overture. What he had not dared in Le magnifique, for instance, Grétry risked in his farce Le jugement de Midas (Paris, Palais Royal, 1778): its curtain opens right with the overture, which satirizes both musically and through pantomime some well-worn topoi of tragédie lyrique, including a sunrise and deus ex machina. And in Guillaume Tell (Paris, Comédie-Italienne, 1791), the composer simply declared the opening pastoral pantomime (complete with ranz de vaches, echo effects, and the ubiquitous dawn) to be the first scene of his “drame.”⁴⁰ Such use of the overture to evoke an opera’s key locale was expanded by Meyerbeer to illustrate the drama’s motivating conflict. The Sinfonia of Il crociato in Egitto (Venice, La Fenice, 1824) not only includes a banda, but less than a third into it, the curtain discloses a minutely scripted pantomime of Christian slaves who (once more at daybreak) begin their forced labor and suffer mistreatment before breaking into a lamenting chorus—the opera’s introductory number.⁴¹ The early curtain was crucial for Meyerbeer’s gradual buildup of audiovisual information. Rather than merely separating instrumental music from vocal and visual drama, the curtain’s placement guaranteed that the overture would be infused first with diegetic sounds and then with both scenic and pantomimic visuals before the dramatic situation was clarified in song. As we have seen in chapter 1, the resulting crescendo of medial signification would become characteristic of Wagner’s theories, although he never mentioned the curtain, a central catalyst thereof.

Even without the addition of pantomimes, the specification of early, musically accompanied curtains widened the curtain’s operation from a momentary, quasi-automatic action outside the audiovisual diegesis into a deliberate aligning of music and the emerging visual expression. As such, curtain-raising moments became not only perceptually longer but also dramatically more meaningful: they established a transitional space between the “real” time of the musical introduction and the represented time (and space) of the drama. Not unlike Gérard Genette’s literary paratexts conceived as a threshold or vestibule, they provided “an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside” of the drama.⁴² Albeit transient and unidirectional, this vestibule expanded the quasi-two-dimensional border marked by the traditional opening curtain into a multidimensional space—one that allowed for novel ways to interlink musical and visual media. By acoustically underlining and dramaturgically exploiting this space, Grétry and other composers directed the spectators’ senses to (and between) specific moments of an opera’s beginning to heighten dramatic effect. Intricately mediating “between different realities,” early curtains became akin to what Alexander R. Galloway has theorized for digital interfaces as “autonomous zones of activity.”⁴³

DELAYED VISION

Such attention to the timing and musical rendition of opening curtains became more widespread during the first half of the nineteenth century, not only in French but also in German works. Unlike in the above examples, however, some German Romantic composers tended to postpone the curtain into the first act. This deferment might have been related to an originally Germanic view of the overture as a symphonic piece in its own right, with a musical integrity that was not to be disturbed by the rustling of drapery or the distraction of the emerging scene.⁴⁴ Granted, German composers also began to tie overtures more closely to their operas with regard to mood, anticipated dramatic trajectory, and musical material. But built-in curtain music or harmonically open endings would have thwarted an overture’s expressive independence, along with its ability to stand on its own in concerts, where opera overtures were regularly performed across nineteenth-century Europe.⁴⁵

In Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (Berlin, 1821), it is therefore after the majestic closure of the sizeable overture and ten further measures of fast, tension-building, and quickly crescendoing arpeggios and rising scales over a pulsating dominant pedal that the curtain opens, on a dominant chord at a moment of changing texture, just as a shot is heard onstage; eight measures later, the chorus enters on the tonic. Weber’s musical curtain-raiser did not close the overture but rather opened the first act. Moreover, by having it precede (rather than accompany) the curtain and by supporting the latter’s movement instead with diegetic sound, he boosted anticipation of the curtain’s rising and explicitly incorporated the latter into his introductory tableau. This propelled the forward drive of the turbulent scene and drew the audience right into the action.⁴⁶ Just how unusual this audiovisual coordination was emerges from extant scores as well as twentieth-century recordings, many of which either indicate the opening curtain after the more typical eight, rather than the original ten, measures or postpone the shot (presumably to ensure its audibility).

A related case is Heinrich Marschner’s romantic opera Hans Heiling (Berlin, 1833), whose musically closed overture is placed between a prologue and act 1. To clarify this unusual beginning, Marschner prescribed an opening curtain in measure sixteen of the Prologue. It follows a four-measure crescendoing chromatic ascent to the highest pitch and dynamic levels yet and coincides with the entry of the brass, leaving ten measures of descending chromatic figuration and a drawn-out tutti cadence before the first chorus (example 2.2).⁴⁷ The curtain’s rising is here set up as an important event within the compact orchestral introduction to the taut Prologue that portrays in medias res the conflict out of which the subsequent drama arises. Moreover, the same curtain music (plus additional cadential chords dwindling to a ppp) later closes the Prologue, thus supporting the curtain’s framing function acoustically. Together with the unorthodox placement of the subsequent overture, this orchestral-cum-curtain frame lets the Prologue’s condensed drama recede into the temporal distance. The resulting effect resembles that of a dissolving view—here of the gnomes’ cave—fading temporarily in and out of the sensual field, or of the cinematic narration of a prehistory before a film’s opening credits.

EXAMPLE 2.2. Heinrich Marschner, Hans Heiling, Prologue, mm. 1–26: opening curtain.

Analogously to Hans Heiling, opening curtains were also frequently specified in operas that lacked overtures altogether. In his one-act opera Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe (Paris, Opéra, 1794), Grétry specified the curtain after twelve measures of generically introductory sequencing material at a return to the tonic (example 2.3). The cue coincides with the beginning of a four-measure modulation to the dominant, with “Scène 1” (and its respective stage direction) indicated only toward the end of this modulation. The interpolated curtain passage thus suggests how long it might have taken for the curtain to disclose the stage. And to offer audiences a chance to absorb the scenery, Grétry added a varied echo of the modulatory passage and a return to the tonic before the title hero starts singing.⁴⁸ Similarly, Jean-François Le Sueur desired for Ossian, ou Les bardes (Paris, Opéra, 1804) that the curtain be down at the beginning of his comparatively short orchestral introduction and raised (notably on another somber night scene) eight measures before the first chorus, at the end of a temporarily thinned orchestral texture and dominant cadence. Merging influences from Grétry and Gluck, Le Sueur followed this instruction with a dominant pedal, chromatically descending figurations, and a half-measure general pause (that is, by a generic transitional passage), after which the chorus enters on the tonic.⁴⁹ In both Denys and Ossian, such musical transitions were expedient precisely because the instrumental introductions were uncommonly brief: explicit musical curtain-raisers audibly reinforced the curtain’s visual signal for the beginning of the audiovisual drama and the call for audiences to attend to the stage.

EXAMPLE 2.3. André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Denys le tyran, maître d’école à Corinthe: the opening of this one-act opera, with its curtain music, as rendered in CCG 28:3.

The tendency to condense and musically integrate instrumental preludes would become more pronounced with grands opéras, which increasingly abandoned long overtures. In the widely circulating orchestral score of Halévy’s La juive (Paris, Opéra, 1835), for example, the overture was cut, and a shorter instrumental prelude led directly into the innovative stage music emanating from the church that formed part of the first set. This format made a curtain indication appropriate. It occurred during the confirmation of a tonic cadence a mere measure before the full-throttle entrance of an offstage organ (whose lengthy prelude itself introduced the offstage opening chorus). Here the curtain did not allow the audience to take in the elaborate medieval scenery before the onset of diegetic music. Instead, the latter acousmatically became part of the scenery itself (thus also helping legitimate the organ, a still novel instrument in the operatic toolbox).⁵⁰ Similarly, for Le prophète Meyerbeer himself replaced the overture with a prelude of merely twenty measures; the curtain rises during its final three measures of a cadential pizzicato bass line, and is likewise immediately followed by pastoral diegetic music (two clarinets imitating echoing shawms) that the emerging rustic landscape seemingly emits.⁵¹ The shorter and more integrated the musical introduction, then, the more precisely composers for the Opéra tended to time the opening curtain, and the more powerfully could that curtain transport the audience into the audiovisual setting. Particularly in introductory scenes that started with offstage music, the curtain functioned as a signal that applause be suppressed and attention channeled to the visual and acoustic scenery.

By contrast, composers of primo ottocento Italian operas seemed on the whole to favor separate overtures—both in the sense that the curtain would usually lift, without special mention, during a pause after the overture, and, relatedly, that the overture’s musical material was often independent of the ensuing opera (Rossini’s trading of overtures between works was notorious). But a link between unusual musical layout and curtain cues is obvious here as well. Rossini notated opening curtains in some Neapolitan works—for instance his “azione tragico-sacra” Mosè in Egitto of 1818 and Zelmira of four years later—that lacked overtures.⁵² And Donizetti, who leaned toward shorter preludes, sometimes ended them with a questioning gesture on the dominant, followed by a half-measure pause. That the curtain would routinely rise during this pause is suggested by the well-nigh ubiquitous fermata and confirmed by indications in several scores.⁵³ Rather than simply remove the shroud between independent numbers, Donizetti thus musically prepared a silent but suspense-packed space for its vanishing, drawing all the more attention to the curtain as the musical resolution would follow only after its rise. Put differently, he rendered the silence “accompanying” the curtain both musically resonant and dramatically enticing.

Expectations for the curtain’s raising could be further amplified by the music that preceded it. Just as some composers added evocative or narrative pantomimes to overtures via an early curtain, so others sought to enhance the musical introduction by means of diegetic sound behind the curtain—which, conversely, might appear to delay its opening. Rossini’s “azione tragica” Ermione (Naples, San Carlo, 1819) includes a lamenting chorus of Trojan prisoners during its mighty overture, which sets the tone for—and exposes the dramatic crux of—the opera no less than does Il crociato’s pantomime. Indeed, Meyerbeer himself (among others) followed suit: the entr’acte to act 3 of Le prophète begins with a stage-band in the wings before the curtain goes up and the band draws closer.⁵⁴ And by 1859, Meyerbeer told the tragic prehistory—the separation of a bridal pair during a thunderstorm—of his comic opera Dinorah (Le pardon de Ploërmel; Paris, Opéra-Comique) in an overture with chorus and wind-machine behind two curtains, the second curtain further distancing the sound. The proscenium curtain’s refusal to open and thereby optically present (or re-present) the narrated events thus banishes these events into the past acoustically, much like a black-and-white filmic flashback might do visually. This time-shift is all the more apt for Dinorah as the title heroine has since gone mad and forgotten the cause of her misery.

Although Meyerbeer evidently hoped for at least some visualization during this overture in the form of a diorama,⁵⁵ he might also have taken a page from Berlioz’s book: Berlioz’s “mélologue” Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (composed in 1831, but revised and published in 1855) had placed the entire orchestra, chorus, and soloists behind the curtain, leaving only the narrator visible in the proscenium. Here the function of the curtain is not, as is usual, to eventually unveil both a fitting stage set and the source of vocal sound, but, on the contrary, to deny any representation. All musical forces sound acousmatically, as if from the depth of the narrator’s memory or imagination. Only once he decides to rehearse his latest composition does the curtain reveal the orchestra and chorus, framing the last musical number as stage music. Accordingly, the curtain is lowered again at the end for the narrator’s final musings.⁵⁶ Berlioz’s “extreme” curtain thus separates the narrator’s (merely audible) thoughts from the (both visible and audible) reality happening “live” for him. Put differently, in line with Romantic idealist aesthetics of music, the curtain privileges sound as a medium of the mind while resisting the “scopic regime” that had begun to dominate nineteenth-century life.⁵⁷ Berlioz furthered the resulting audiovisual tension in Les Troyens (Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 1863), where he placed behind the curtain—albeit momentarily—not just a vocalizing chorus but also dancers, with the sound of tapping feet additionally whetting the visual appetite.

Such inclusion of singing or ambient sound effects in precurtain music unsettled the temporal boundaries between musical introduction and audiovisual drama, widening the dramaturgically ambiguous curtain-opening space. Yet it also pushed the medial boundaries between visual and auditory stimuli. Precisely when concealing the source of already audible diegetic music, the curtain, a membrane between both media, became porous; its eventual rise signaled less the long-expected arrival of the dramatic world than the visual revelation of something already aurally present (or, in fact, acoustically created). In this sense, self-conscious curtain cues were part and parcel of an increasingly graphic—which is to say, visually suggestive—musical aesthetic. More than that, they reflected a growing nineteenth-century interest in sensory correspondences between the different arts and the concomitant expansion of each medium’s sensory borders.⁵⁸ All this challenged the conceptual foundation of automated curtain openings, which relied, as we have seen, on the strict separation of musical preparation and audiovisual narration.

To be sure, “delaying” the curtain emphasized its essence as what Brian Kane has called an acousmatic technique, whose general function was “to split the sensorium—to separate the ear from the eye—and intensify the act of listening”:⁵⁹ the descriptive nature of orchestral music would be noted all the more as vision was denied. But this buildup of aural pointers at the same time multiplied expectations for the unveiling of the scene, thereby intensifying the audience’s gaze at the curtain. By dint of its increasingly individualized movements, in other words, the curtain began to draw more attention to itself.⁶⁰ On the one hand, it became newly perceivable as a material, oblique barrier to (seeing) the stage. On the other hand, as Jacques Derrida has observed of the parergon or frame in the visual arts, it “is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.”⁶¹ Despite its increased artistic prominence, the curtain’s destiny was still its eventual vanishing, and it could do so the more effectively the more audience expectations had been raised. This dialectic between presence and absence, visibility and concealment was reflected in debates on the curtain’s materiality. Contemporaries, for example, were not of one mind on whether decorating the main curtain would be pleasant or distracting—that is, whether it was primarily part of the theatrical architecture (in which case visual grandeur was in order) or of performances (in which case modest neutrality would be helpful).⁶² Once liberated from being an automatic switch between overture and audiovisual drama proper, then, the curtain began to mediate in increasingly complex ways between sound and vision as well as between theatrical space, the audience’s imagination, and the multimedia presentation of the drama.

MULTIPLYING CURTAINS

In view of curtains’ growing temporal flexibility and audiovisual mediation, it was logical that composers would eventually indicate them not just for an opera’s beginning but also for subsequent acts. After all, unless these acts started in a more eighteenth-century fashion with recitative, they regularly featured at most a short orchestral prelude, making the point of transition into the scene less obvious than in the case of an overture. The same concern for signposting held also for musical entr’actes or interludes, which became more common through the nineteenth century, partly because of the growing desire for dramatic continuity we have already observed regarding overtures, and partly—like the spread of act curtains themselves—for practical reasons.⁶³ Responding to a budding appetite for historically realistic stagings encouraged by French opera since the Napoleonic period (a development that was closely tied to the fashion for historical detail in literature and the visual arts), throughout the nineteenth century operatic sets became grander, and they increasingly used practicable scenery—three-dimensional constructions and architectural set pieces—rather than just painted flats and drops. All this rendered scene changes more cumbersome and time consuming. While act curtains made invisible the maneuvering of such heavy structures and dampened the inevitable noises, entr’actes were designed to ensure performative continuity between acts and to hold audience attention, often acoustically evoking dramatic events or atmospheres in the manner of preludes. Given the entr’acte’s generically transitional function, however, it was all the more important that the actual moment of the curtain’s (re)opening be marked sonically.

Thus, true to his reputation for micromanaging every detail, Meyerbeer included not only short entr’actes but also curtain cues for virtually every act of the three works he saw into production at the Opéra. In so doing, he paraded a whole gamut of suitable orchestral curtain-raisers, whether a rising fanfare (for act 2 of Robert le diable, 1831), calming cadential passages (Robert, act 3; Les huguenots, act 2, 1836), emphatic fortissimo unisons (Les huguenots, act 4), the repeat of an opening motif (Robert, act 5), or—most frequently—chromatically rising scales over a dominant pedal (Les huguenots, acts 3 and 5; Le prophète, act 4).⁶⁴ In short, most of his curtains open at musically suitable places, facilitating the listener’s understanding that vision would return while letting that vision take form in close alignment with the auditory stimulus. Particularly when rising at the end of a chromatic crescendoing ascent over the dominant (as in act 5 of Les huguenots, where the ramp ends abruptly on an augmented chord leading into the boisterous ball scene), the curtain seems to be pulled up not by invisible ropes—that is, by external technology—but by the music itself: at a point where harmonic tension, dynamics, pitch range, and texture can hardly increase further, the disclosure of the stage provides a visual relief to the musical suspense. Small wonder that Meyerbeer insisted that stage director and conductor meticulously time their mutual signals to effect this exacting coordination.⁶⁵

Small wonder also that it was often under Parisian influence that composers of Italian operas became more attentive to act curtains. For example, Donizetti composed out his curtain-opening space in his last work written for the Opéra, Dom Sébastien, roi du Portugal (1843). For its final act, the curtain precedes the prelude’s concluding pause by two measures, rising on a sudden fortissimo tonic chord that is then followed by a seventh chord and fermatas. This curtain postpones the harmonic suspense into the opened stage, thus shifting expectations from the scene’s revelation to the beginning of the dramatic action proper.⁶⁶ Similarly, although Verdi’s overtures or preludes were usually tonally closed and followed by the curtain, in Don Carlos, his 1867 magnum opus for the French capital, he musically integrated no fewer than four opening curtains. Rather than interpolating transitional passages, though, Verdi aligned these curtains with structural shifts in thematic material. The first-act curtain coincides with the sudden turn from a miniature atmospheric prelude to the more energetic lead into the choral introduction. And for the last two acts, the curtain opens at the repeat (with heightened melodic urge) of each act’s opening orchestral motif, thus visually intensifying the already expressive—and oppressive—musical scene-painting while leaving audiences free to take in this setting before tending to the soloists’ heartaches.⁶⁷ The shockingly immediate beginning of Otello (Milan, La Scala, 1887) would barely have been possible without such a concise coordination of graphic music and timed curtain.

In addition to the more widespread use of act curtains, the generally slowed-down scene changes also encouraged curtains to transcend the outer edges of an act by descending in its midst. A traditional method for transformations within acts had been to alternate between “short” and “long” sets: an intimate (often interior) scene was played at the front of the stage while the next set was being prepared behind a painted backdrop whose removal would quickly disclose the subsequent, grander scene.⁶⁸ Hence the longstanding equation, in French and Italian parlance, of toile or tela—meaning “canvas”—with theatrical curtains of all sorts, even after the more materially or functionally appropriate terms rideau (in reference to the folded texture) and sipario (linking to ancient Roman practice) began to be applied to the heavy proscenium curtain.⁶⁹ Swift transformations via midstage drops continued to be practiced in the nineteenth century, especially among Italian composers (French production books for Donizetti operas detail them copiously). But after around 1830, the number of sets and changes per opera decreased dramatically in French works, which instead emphasized the finesse, originality, and splendor of each individual set. Various opera houses therefore started to employ curtains for transformations within acts as well—a procedure already common in spoken theater and popular shows across Europe.⁷⁰

As the notion of the curtain as theatrical frame suggests, the introduction of such intermediary curtains was no small disruption of operatic habits. In the absence of interludes, an intermediary curtain could mislead spectators into believing that an intermission was afoot. Within acts, theaters therefore usually moved not the main (proscenium) curtain but a second curtain, hung behind the first. This so-called drop scene (Zwischenvorhang or rideau de manœuvre) was lighter and could veil scene changes faster, while the main curtain maintained the spatiotemporal frame of the performance.⁷¹ True, practices and nomenclatures varied widely; just like tela and toile, the simple terms rideau, sipario, Vorhang, or curtain were often used interchangeably for both proscenium and act curtains, while Zwischenvorhang and drop scene sometimes specifically referred to painted canvases lowered in the middle of the stage (rather than in front of it) to veil a long set.⁷² But, clearly, different kinds of curtains marked various structural places within an opera, thereby helping along appropriate audience behavior.

Aesthetically, however, the introduction of drop scenes within acts remained contested, even beyond opera. In 1837, the Prussian actor, playwright, and theatrical director August Lewald observed of transformations on Parisian stages that “a curtain is always lowered for a few moments, which conceals the stage from sight.” And he recommended this method to German theaters, since their frequent open changes within acts, with their “jumps from the forest into the living room, from the church into the garden etc.,” did not foster theatrical illusion.⁷³ But not everyone agreed. As early as 1802, the French architect Louis Catel had suggested darkening the theater during transformations in spoken drama instead of lowering curtains, since the former procedure was more stimulating to the human imagination, which conjures images from darkness. Two years later, an anonymous Parisian reviewer praised the performance of a pantomime for not having been “unpleasantly interrupted by a drop which comes down and destroys the illusion by leaving the spectator to himself for too long.” Similarly, in 1877 the Dresden theater historian Robert Prölß maintained that open transformations, for all their clumsy expediency, were more inspiring to watch than was a curtain, which inappropriately interrupted the drama and usually prolonged the pause between scenes as well.⁷⁴ In other words, Prölß pointed out that any attempt at veiling stage machineries was itself an act of technology—and inevitably prone to be recognized as such.

At stake, then, was the issue of how best to preserve the theatrical illusion, both during individual performances and regarding the artistic nature of theater in general: directors had to decide whether the exposure of the theater’s internal mechanical workings was less disruptive than the use of a drop scene. That this question was raised at all epitomizes the changes in theatrical aesthetics since the Baroque era, when—as we recall from this book’s introduction—the open play with machines was very much part of the spectacle’s attraction. Individual drops (often in the shape of a cloud) might therefore conceal parts of the scene but never the full stage at once.⁷⁵ Given the growing emphasis, during the long nineteenth century, on a show’s seamless artistic surface, it is not surprising that drop scenes soon carried the day. By the 1840s, German theater manuals mentioned them as customary in London, Paris, Berlin, and other “reasonably important” theaters; and in 1851, for instance, Verdi explicitly demanded one in Rigoletto for the first-act transformation from a “magnificent room in the ducal palace” to the “deserted end of a street”—that is, for a change between two elaborate long sets.⁷⁶

The novel technique was aided by the expanding material diversification of curtains themselves. Just as their movements began to be integrated into the musical flow, so drop scenes could be tailor-made to match specific productions or dramatic situations. In 1829, the Opéra mitigated the (then) unusual curtain after act 1 of Guillaume Tell by having it depict a suitable historical scene.⁷⁷ Two years later, the infamous nocturnal cemetery scene in act 3 of Robert le diable was to be prepared—that is, the transformation from mountainscape around the cloister to cloister graveyard was to be accomplished—behind a lowered drop painted with clouds to sustain the gloomy supernatural atmosphere during a short orchestral postlude: the Parisian production team cunningly dubbed this drop a “magic curtain” (rideau de magie). Its merely auxiliary purpose was emphasized in the published score: theaters that could pull off a quick, open transformation were permitted to dispense not only with the curtain but also with its accompanying music (which mostly recycled motifs from the preceding duet before petering out into lower-string rumblings befitting the ensuing necromancy).⁷⁸ Cloud pieces had been a staple of opera since its very beginnings, not least because they offered suitably celestial vehicles for dei ex machina. But expanding them into full-size stage curtains was aesthetically and pragmatically different—so much so that “cloud curtain” became a synonym for all manner of locally colored drop scenes. The Opéra’s midcentury inventory of machines and decorations listed a sizeable collection of “rideaux de nuages”; and by 1885, Pougin devoted an entire entry of his theatrical dictionary to specific procedures whereby such curtains could efficiently veil a transformation without interrupting either action or illusion.⁷⁹ In addition, gauzes, scrims, or transparencies that had long been used in popular shows were also deployed to veil the stage to various degrees; Meyerbeer himself, for instance, mentioned black gauzes for the end of Robert’s act 3.⁸⁰ (The diaphanous curtains mocked in Böhm’s Ring parody, then, had roots in reality.)

Towards midcentury, in short, not only the use and timing of curtains but also their fabrics, shapes, and optics multiplied. This profusion afforded ever more opportunities for composers to employ curtains as customized dramatic devices rather than cut-and-dried routine. What is more, drop scenes that were visually fitted to the preceding or emerging stage representation functioned both as curtains and as scenery—which is to say that they were simultaneously stage technology and pictorial medium. Accordingly, the resulting transformations could appear to be at once open and covered. Chameleon-like, the curtain adapted to its dramatic surroundings to strive for invisibility: as drop scene, it began to veil itself.

ACT CLOSINGS